out again when he saw Elaine standing in the doorway. She would know what to do, he thought She was sixteen years old, and almost all grown up. If his mother needed any help, Elaine would be able to provide it He watched as Elaine moved toward the bed, waiting for her to say something, do something. But she didn’t She just stood there by the bed—watching.
Just as the little boy was about to call out to his sister, he saw her suddenly raise her hands above her head.
He saw the meat cleaver from the kitchen clutched in her hands.
And he saw the cleaver flash down, and heard the sound as the hard metal slashed through his father’s skull.
He heard his mother cry out, and he watched in confusion as she tried to straggle free of his father’s weight. He wondered why Elaine didn’t help his mother, now that she had stopped his father from doing whatever he was doing.
He realized that Blaine wasn’t going to help his mother. He watched, horrified, as his sister raised the cleaver again, and brought it down into his mother’s face. He thought he heard his mother scream, but it was too quick for him to be sure. Frozen, he watched as his sister raised the cleaver—again and again—bringing it flashing through the air. Long after they had both stopped moving, the knife continued to flash until all he could see was silver and red.
Terrified, the little boy huddled in the closet, wondering if his aster was going to find him and start hitting him, too. But she was standing still now, looking at what she had done. And then she started moving again. She dropped the bloody cleaver on the bed, and knelt down on the floor, as if looking for something he couldn’t see.
She stood up again, and pulled a chair to the center of the room, directly below the light fixture in the ceiling. She climbed up onto the chair and began tying something to the light fixture. It was an electrical cord, the kind his parents used when they needed something longer than the cords that came on the electric things. He wondered why she was tying it to the light fixture. Everybody knew that electric cords have to be plugged in for them to work.
He saw his sister tie the other end of the cord around her neck, and he realized what she was going to do. He’d seen this before. She was going to hang herself. He’d seen pictures of it. But if she hung herself, who would take care of him? He had to stop her. The little boy finally found his voice.
He screamed and as the wail escaped his throat, the girl on the chair spun around and lost her footing. As the chair fell away from her, the closet door swung open, and their eyes met And then her neck snapped. It was over.
The little boy watched helplessly as his sister swung slowly back and forth. Finally he moved toward her, and reached out to touch her. She felt strange. She didn’t feel like his sister anymore. He wondered what to do.
Much later—he didn’t know how much later—he heard a scream. He didn’t respond to it He was huddled in the corner of the closet, his knees drawn up under his chin, his arms wrapped around his legs. He thought he heard some other noises too, and even later, he was aware that the closet door was being pulled open. It wasn’t until a pair of arms reached down and picked him up that he started crying. When he started, he cried for a long time.
They kept him in a hospital for the first day after the discovery of the gruesome scene in the bedroom. The nuns took care of him, and asked him a lot of questions, but he couldn’t answer any of them. He wanted his mother and his father. They didn’t come to see him.
On the second day they took him to the convent. He didn’t know what a convent was, only that it was a big building, and there were lots of nuns there who fussed over him a lot. And there were other children there, children who lived there. The little boy wondered if he, too, was going to live there.
As he went to sleep the second night, he wondered if his parents would come to see him. And Elaine. He wondered what had happened to Elaine. As he drifted